


no comets seen

by zealotarchaeologist



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Gen, background implied clem/gucci because i cant help myself, fix it but everyone is still having an extremely bad time all around, spoilers for pzn 28
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:13:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25639318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zealotarchaeologist/pseuds/zealotarchaeologist
Summary: Progression, they had said, as she drifted in and out of fever. There is no end. No tip of the spear, no place where the road ends. Only progression.[SPOILERS FOR PZN 28]
Comments: 19
Kudos: 21





	1. past

**Author's Note:**

> i promised myself i would wait a week and if i was still sad i could have little a creative freedom, as a treat. well! what a WEEK of sadness it has been.
> 
> warnings:  
> depictions of injuries  
> depictions of violence  
> discussion of death and grief  
> SPOILERS FOR PZN 28, EVEN AS DIVERGENT FROM CANON AS THIS IS
> 
> title is from julius caesar: when beggars die there are no comets seen, the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

She’s going to have to lose the arm.

And yeah, probably more than that, too. They’ve seen salvage in worse states, but that’s mechs. Mechs don’t shatter their limbs in a fall, don’t have their ribs cracked from resuscitation later. Certainly don’t vomit blood and water all over the people dragging their sorry asses out of the bay.

Whatever happened to the sad little body currently occupying the infirmary of Carrion Collections happened hard. Someone wanted her dead. Might be easier to argue she wanted to die—but then, that doesn’t account for the arm. The cut was severe, straight to the bone. And that was before it took the impact of the water. Now it hangs uselessly off her side like a torn-up flag.

Their medic relays all this to Midnite Matinee as she takes in the sight of their lost cause. The whole thing is starting to piss her off. It’s already been way more time and resources than it’s worth and she doesn’t want to spare any more, but if this stupid kid dies then it’s really all been a waste. Sunk cost fallacy, sure, but it’s also the most interesting thing that’s happened all week.

 _Priceless salvage_ , the message had said. _Millennium Break has dropped something important._ _It might even be the Divine Future._ And instead there was this. The other key difference between a mech and a human body: patching up a mech is usually a better investment.

“Give it twelve more hours.” She decides, “Then we cut our losses and dump her at a hospital. Or a morgue.”

Then she stands, shrugs on her coat. It’s late in autumn now, the summer on Partizan having passed in a strange and revolutionary blur. Midnite doesn’t care a whole lot about all that, but it means a lot of battles, a lot of wreckage. A lot of money to be made. It’s been a good year, all things considered, or she probably wouldn’t have taken this chance at all.

It’s a long walk into town on her own two feet, where the nearest Semaphore outpost is waiting for her. They’ve got the new network on their base, of course, but a deal like this is best hidden in plain sight. No knowing when the Principality is going to get tired of letting this go on. And she wants to stretch her legs anyway.

She pays for the usual ten minutes and slides into a café seat, the system already booted in front of her and ready to log in. Sure enough, her mysterious new friend from Horizon hasn’t said anything. It’s still the top message on her screen, titled in massive letters: READ ASAP. TIP WRT PRICELESS SALVAGE. For all the fuss, turned out to be bullshit in the end.

 _didnt find future or anything useful_ she types and sends immediately, then considers. Should she mention the babysitting? Certainly nothing in the original message had said anything about a dead body. Or an alive body, whatever she ends up being. She’ll give it a minute, she decides. If they ask, there’s no reason not to be honest—either she gets a good ransom or she gets hired to kill someone who’s already basically dead, which is pretty convenient either way.

Sure enough, there’s a ping in response.

It’s a screenshot: proof of a significant transfer into one of Carrion Collections’ accounts. _For your trouble._ Is the caption, and nothing else.

 _thanks_ she shoots back without thinking much of it. The Semaphore system beeps at her, sounding almost irritated. _Message could not be delivered. Invalid destination._

Midnite blinks. Well, then. Whoever it is really didn’t want to be found. There goes her big break.

She logs off and stands, doesn’t bother to push in her chair. There’s better things to think about: supply runs and contacts and getting some actual good food since she’s in town. Stepping out of the Semaphore outpost, the wind makes her shiver, the tips of her ears twitching. Hot noodles are the priority.

The evening passes quickly with her stomach and her wallet full. By the time she makes it back to the CC base, her declared 12 hours are just about through.

So it’s either by some kind of miracle or just dumb luck, their medic tells her, that the girl woke up.

It’s part curiosity and part a lack of something better to do that draws her into the infirmary. And sure enough: even looking like a living bruise, she’s awake. She doesn’t react when Midnite sits down beside her. Her eyes are watery and they stare off, unfocused, to the ceiling.

“Please,” is the only thing she says for a long time, just, “Please, please, please,” overflowing from her raw and flooded throat like a prayer until her voice wears out and she closes her eyes again. It’s hard to tell what she’s asking for. Whether she’s just that desperate to live or whether she wishes they had thrown her back into the bay.

It’s pretty annoying. “You know,” Midnite says, kicking her feet up on the bed, “Most people don’t whine so much when someone saves their life.”

The girl does not react. Her breathing is labored, her face sunken. She’s covered unpleasantly in sweat simply from this small effort. “Please,” she hisses like a broken steam valve, her good hand clutching uselessly at the thin cot she’s laid up on.

It’s sad in the way a dying bird is when a pet drops it on your doorstep. Midnite has seen people die before—she’s been in this business long enough, right—and she has no desire to wait around and watch. With a little wave and a “Good luck with that.” She stands, and leaves.

Outside the little compound of their office and barracks, the true night of Partizan is starting to trickle in. Carrion Collections operates at all hours, of course, and the floodlights are clicking on across the yard where her team picks machines apart, piece by piece. You learn to tell, over time, which parts are worth keeping, which are just going to take up precious space in a warehouse. Which mechs can be scoured and repaired and repainted and sold, which are never going to move again. By now, she has a keen eye for it. The one in her infirmary isn’t going to make it to morning.

The funeral for Gur Sevraq is a solemn thing, but as lavish as the people of Millennium Break can afford. In the budding traditions of their faith, it is celebrated not as the end of a life but as the continual turning of a cycle, with all the joy and pain and complication that entails.

Gucci Garantine is there, of course. Now more than ever it is time to be a public face, as the people look for leaders. Officially, Millennium Break has no such structure, but she knows perfectly well that power does not always have to be written into law. When she talks, people listen. And she means to keep it that way, which means she cannot retreat now. She must be on the front lines of battle, she must be seated at the table. Otherwise, everything that has happened is all for nothing.

It’s easier to focus on this, on the next steps and nothing else. She gives a speech, one among many, about the importance of remembering their true goals, acknowledging that Millennium Break is so much greater than any one person, of turning their feelings into action. It goes over well with those who believe that Gur Sevraq has not died at all, not at the hands of the Traitor Princess, but simply performed another miracle and vanished. She has no opinion on this. They are a small minority.

Gucci remembers writing the speech, but not delivering it. One moment she’s in her room, doing up the buttons on an elegant mourning gown, and the next she’s walking away from a podium to the applause of hundreds. So it must have gone alright.

Sovereign Immunity, who speaks after her, does not do quite as well. It’s much the same content—looking not to Future but to _the_ future and all that—but his delivery falters. Either he is drunk or he has not been sleeping well.

Neither of these are acceptable, so she tracks him down later, after the ceremony has grown quiet. It takes some doing. He is in the last place she looks, not because she did not know he would be there but because she simply didn’t want to go. But like all necessary things, there is no use in avoiding it.

He stands at the railing of the flight deck, black suit blending in with the night sky. In the few hours of true darkness, the constellations have taken their places. There, the crook. There, the sphinx. Sovereign Immunity leans over the railing, looking down into nothing. Gucci is careful to make noise as she approaches, so as not to startle him.

“How are you holding up?” she asks, coming up beside him. Her dress billows in the faint wind, a storm of black silk cascading.

She needn’t have worried about surprising him. He doesn’t react at all for a long moment.

“Sorry. I should be asking you that.” He sighs, heavy, the old mountain shaking apart under its own weight. “I’m not a very good Sovereign Immunity. Apparently.”

 _No_ , Gucci thinks viciously, _you weren’t_. But it will accomplish nothing. And even if her deepest impulse is to tell him that it was his fault, she knows perfectly well that’s not true. It is only one person’s fault. It was only ever one person’s fault.

“I’m alright. Since you’re asking.” She tries. He wasn’t asking, really, but she has to at least try.

Sovereign doesn’t respond, which is response enough.

Gucci leans over the railing, mirroring his position. Immediately, she regrets it—the water is a black void with a gravity of its own. As if it were pulling, calling. The stars reflect in its surface, a false promise of freedom. “It’s a long way down,” slips out of her unbidden, her heart in her throat.

“Yeah.” Sovereign swallows, hard. “It’s—yeah. Do you—”

“No.”

“Right. I shouldn’t…”

“We shouldn’t.”

“We shouldn’t.” He repeats, staring down into the water. “So why did you come up here? I know it wasn’t to ask a useless old man how he’s doing.”

“I’m here because I meant all that bullshit I just said.” She starts, a little too harsh, because frankly it is getting a little tiring, having to be a paragon of revolution and appropriate emotional self-control and drag everyone else around by the yoke. “Well. Maybe not all of it. But I want us to look forward. And you have some…experience in this. Maybe you’re a fine Sovereign Immunity. Maybe it was just the wrong—” _person_ , she can’t bring herself to say. “—time and place. I’m here because I want us to get up and try again.”

This is all true, and she says it earnestly. It’s just also true that she’s here because it’s not fair that he gets to give up responsibility and hide away and indulge in sadness. In her heart, she still thinks of him as a coward. But it’s also true that he was a coward who cared for the person whose name no one has said all night and so, for her sake, Gucci is here. And there is so much work still to be done.

Sovereign looks up from the endless dark water. The artificial lighting on the deck makes him look old. He’s been old, but it’s different, never seemed to show this much before.

“I remember when you were both just kids. You were so, so different.” He says. “And so alike.”

It lands like a blow to the chest, open palmed and aching. But she doesn’t look away. Nowhere to look that wouldn’t hurt. All she can do is push through. “Not too alike, I hope.”

The first thing Clementine Kesh becomes aware of is that everything hurts.

When her back had hit the water, the sudden shock of utter pain had taken her out almost instantly. Now, the pain is here and present and unceasing and she is in full possession of her senses. Every part of her body hurts. Parts she didn’t know existed hurt. Her arm doesn’t hurt, which she realizes is worse, but she can’t think about it. It hurts so, so badly to think. So she doesn’t. She can’t.

“Please,” she groans, to no one in particular, and passes out again.

But she can’t even have that. Every time she comes to it’s for a little longer, a little clearer agony without the fog of unconsciousness diluting it. It hurts in a way nothing has ever hurt before. It hurts more than she ever imagined something could hurt.

She doesn’t know how long it’s been. The pain turns every second into a millennium. It could be hours, days, weeks. She can’t fathom any longer than that.

Impossible to track time by the light, since she wakes at seemingly random hours. Clementine never sees any doctors, but even she can figure out that someone must be keeping her alive. Someone keeps leaving glasses of water by her bedside. She doesn’t have the strength to grab them even if she wanted to. Simply closes her eyes and hopes to sleep again. She doesn’t look at her arm. She can’t think. Warm darkness swallows her again, drawing her back into the water.

This time, when she wakes, it’s sound that hits her first. Voices with a fuzzy, distant quality. As if she were hearing them from underwater. Maybe she is. Maybe this is some strange hallucination before death, maybe it’s just taking her a very long time to die.

“—pointless. Get out to Oxbridge, leave her at the hospital—"

“No hospital.” Clementine chokes out, her voice weak and utterly unfamiliar to her own ears. Desperate, even if this is some kind of dream. Every word is effort and fresh pain searing down her throat. “Please. Not a citizen.”

They wheel on her instantly, both of them. The leporine woman must be in charge, because she makes a firm motion with her hand and the other one—her mystery doctor, maybe—leaves the room in a hurry.

Being now alone, she pulls up a chair beside Clem’s bed. If she could think better, she might feel suddenly aware of how vulnerable she is, shivering her cot. But she can’t follow her thoughts much further than pain and confusion and fear.

“So.” She smiles. It is not a friendly smile. Clementine hurts too much to care. “Who the hell are you?”

Clementine opens her mouth to answer, but no sound comes out. Who is she? Who the hell is she? She’s not Clementine Kesh anymore, that’s certain. They took that from her with her citizenship. And now she’s not even Clementine, really. Certainly she’s not Clem, snapped in frustration or said warmly in secret. Clementine Kesh went over the side of Icebreaker Prime and died. There’s no way she could be Clementine Kesh.

“Belltower. Is my name. Not a citizen.” She has to pause nearly between every word, to try to breathe again, to swallow down the pain in her throat.

“Yeah, you said.” The stranger leans forward, crossing her legs carelessly. Clearly she’s seen plenty of injuries before, and she is neither disturbed nor impressed. “And look, I’m not the type to give a shit about that. But when we fished you up from the bay, I was hoping for something a little more valuable to salvage than a half-dead non-citizen.”

There’s no cruelty in the way she says it, only transactional honesty. There should be some measure of relief there, in the fact that she’s been taken not by spies but by scavengers.

If there is, she can’t feel it. It hurts too much to focus. Clementine’s head spins. Her surroundings waver, dreamlike. The last time she was in a hospital, the last time someone had been sitting by her bedside--

( _Progression_ , they had said, as she drifted in and out of fever. _There is no end. No tip of the spear, no place where the road ends. Only progression.)_

“Did you find—” she tries to muster, and is disrupted by the screaming protest of her throat. But she has to know. “—anything else. Anyone. Metal—” It’s just too much, burns out of her with a horrible rasping sound. It hurts so much. She can’t do it.

“Nah.” The scavenger flicks her ears in a mild sort of irritation. “Just you and a whole bunch of soaked fabric. Lucky you.”

Clementine sobs.

And it hurts, it hurts so horribly in her chest and her throat but once she’s started she can’t stop. Even when no more tears come to her eyes, even when it makes her double over again, coughing red flecks of blood into the blankets. She just can’t stop crying. It’s unbecoming. Unfitting for a scion of House Kesh. But she is not that, and so she curls further into herself and cries.


	2. sharpness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i miss her so much already :(
> 
> warnings:  
> depictions of injuries and unpleasant medical situations  
> discussion of grief and death  
> very brief mention of suicidal thoughts

The medic doesn’t put her under when they make the last cut through her arm.

Painkillers, Midnite Matinee assures her, are costly, and she’s already running up quite a debt just laying there in bed, eating up supplies. A debt that she, lacking any form of identity or property, is going to have to find a way of paying off.

 _Or what?_ Clementine thinks. _You’ll kill me?_

It doesn’t matter. Not the painkillers nor the money. Her arm parts from her as easily as shrugging off a coat, the nerves already deadened, infection creeping in. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Clementine Kesh is dead, and there is no throne in Cruciat. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t remember why it ever mattered to her so much, only that it is forever beyond her grasp.

Her recovery is by all measures miraculous (ha,) but that does not stop it from being unfathomably slow. Nothing is left to her except to sit up in bed and try, desperately, not to think. As the pain ever so slowly dulls, it becomes harder and harder to avoid. She does consider the idea of being dead, again. How could she not? But her body, as if to spite her, clings to life with an animal stubbornness. Like a machine, it continues drawing breath despite her wishes.

She feels like a broken machine. Maybe there never was any Clementine Kesh—maybe Crysanth had a beautiful automaton built to follow a perfect script, and now her role is done. It’s entirely possible that her mother is already working to erase her name from history. Oh, no, they will say, Crysanth Kesh never had an heir. She lived and ruled alone until the end of her bitter cold life, and named a more capable successor. Someone competent.

“So from the scars, you’ve gotta be a soldier.” Midnite Matinee drawls at her bedside, calculating how best to make her useful. Whether it would be worth getting her a prosthetic. “A pilot, yeah?”

“Yes. A pilot.” And a princess, and a commander, and a revolutionary. Clementine closes her eyes. “I was never very good at it.” Nor at diplomacy, nor farming, nor chess.

But she is still a body, and a body can always be useful. They always need more bodies on Partizan.

As soon as she can take her first shuddering steps, she is moved from the infirmary into the small, cramped barracks. It is much the same, only with less privacy. Less privacy even than a cell on Icebreaker Prime. Those who cannot afford their own space pack together like cargo. Clementine does not have it left in her to complain.

Like so many other wounded stateless on this moon, her debt is paid in labor. She is fairly useless, but expectations are lower than they have ever been. There is something bizarrely comforting in this, in nothing being expected of her. Even Crysanth expected things, even when that expectation was failure.

It becomes quickly clear that she cannot manage even the most basic of repairs, nor anything that requires any sort of finesse. So instead she is relegated to the familiar sort of work that even she can’t ruin: pick that up and put it over there.

What muscle she had gained in imprisonment has withered away now. She takes it back in slow increments, adjusting to the lack of her arm. Lifting the boxes, cleaning the rooms. First only for minutes before her body gives out, then an hour, then more. Clementine Kesh would have chafed at this kind of work. Now, it’s best when she’s working. If she focuses only on the motions of her body, if she lets the pain and exhaustion bear her away, she won’t have to think.

The nights this doesn’t happen are the worst.

If she is left alone with her thoughts, the numb disbelief gives way to confusion and blind fury. It burns like a pile of coals in her gut. _There will be another throne_ , she tries to tell herself, tries to focus only on that idea. The old self-soothing certainty, given new form. _There will be other thrones, and they will be mine. Are already mine._

It’s pointless. She loses the plot quickly, the thoughts unraveling when she tries to cling to them.

 _Progression,_ she whispers instead, muffled quiet into her pillow. _Progression, progression, progression_ until sleep claims her.

People learn quickly that she won’t give much in terms of conversation, and then no one looks twice at her. The only thing that had been remarkable about her injuries was the manner of her recovery. Now she could be any of the thousands on this moon showing the cost of the Principality’s endless war. Plenty of the people who work alongside her bear the same scars. Plenty of them keep their silence, too.

No one recognizes her. Part of Clementine rages at this—is she so easily forgettable, then?—but she isn’t sure what she would do if anyone had, and is grateful for not having to answer that question. She doesn’t recognize herself much, either. The person she glimpses in the mirror is gaunter, harder without the cushion of wealth. They do not resemble the person once depicted in beautiful portraits adorning the Winter Palace. She supposes they will have been torn down by now.

Clementine Kesh is, in all ways that matter, dead. This is how the Principality decides its truth.

And because she is dead in all the ways that matter, she doesn’t know how to be Clementine Kesh anymore. When she thinks of the throne, its shape is hazy and abstract. It had seemed so precise before, so important that the image in her mind loomed so much taller than it really was. What did she think she was going to prove, to her mother or to anyone? It had all seemed to make so much sense at the time. How did she ever think anyone would love her, when even their boundless well of patience had—

( _This piece of our faith sustains us,_ he had said. _Progression. Hard to give up when there is no end to reach._ )

It sticks in her mind, even when she doesn’t want it to. _Progression_. She hisses under her breath as she walks back and forth across the compound, heavy metal cargo balanced against her good shoulder.

She’s no better at weaving plans than she was before. It had just seemed so simple then, the idea of _getting the throne._ The distance between here and there is so vastly impossible she might as well be trying to reclaim the planet Kesh itself. So Clementine does not plan. She works until she cannot, and sleeps, and wakes, and does it again and again, like a horrible endless dream. Curls up inside herself and waits, hoping that she will wake up a scion of Stel Kesh once more. It doesn’t happen.

The chill that has come to Partizan passes over Icebreaker Prime in its new, permanent home. Here, they are heated by the furnaces of war, piping steam throughout the fortress. Comfort so long as one does not stray above deck. A comfort that Gucci Garantine denies herself most days. The cold sharpens her focus.

But not today. Today she enjoys the warmth of Cas’alear Rizah’s sparse but elegant office, redecorated officer’s quarters. A simple map is spread across their desk, and they are considering it when she enters.

They smile—genuine, pleased to see her. “Saint Dawn.” They say, and she finds herself smiling in return. Nearly everyone else on board has lapsed back into _Gucci_ or _Lady Garantine_ , but cas saw her on the battlefield first. “Please. Sit with me.”

She does, and suddenly they’re pouring two glasses of brandy from a bottle with a sea serpent label. “I admit, when you asked me here, I assumed it would be for matters of strategy. Not that I’m complaining,” she adds, and takes a sip. It tastes faintly of apples. Not her first choice, but it’s been a long time since she shared a drink with anyone. At least since—well.

Cas laughs a little. They’ve fit in surprisingly easily among the rebels of Millennium Break, a calm and noble bearing that steadies some of the more chaotic elements. While they understand the worth of political games, they remain unfailingly earnest, which Gucci appreciates. If Dahlia gave the order, cas would no doubt kill her—but it would be a sword from the front rather than a knife in the back, and that counts for something.

“This is a matter of strategy, I assure you.” The smile fades as cas looks over the map again. It lacks the illumination she’s used to, but still they give it a certain reverence. “You plan to seize Orion factories in the low slate. A smart move, looking to the supply lines first.”

“It’s how Horizon has always operated.” Gucci defers, polite. It would be unnecessary to gloat that this is what she knows, even better than piloting. All that time spent tracking minute changes in budgets and tax policy has added up to a keen eye for economic weakness. “Not all of us fought under the Princept’s banner.” She nudges, a warning shot.

“I take no issue with the idea. It’s just interesting how you’ve placed yourself on the front line. And have done so in every engagement since I arrived here.”

“No need to fix what isn’t broken. This strategy serves us well. The specific capabilities of the Transgress Oblige—”

“Oh, I know. I’ve seen you.” Cas’alear stands, draws themselves up to full height. It’s not a threatening motion, but a tired one. As if sitting were far more exhausting to them. “Let me be blunt, then: you work yourself too hard. There are plenty of capable people in our forces. Who are you trying to prove yourself to?”

Gucci freezes. No one, she nearly says, and it would be the honest answer. But she understands exactly what they’re getting at, and wants to kick herself for not fearing them more. They’ve broken sharper swords than hers. Safer to say nothing.

Wouldn’t be the first time she’s underestimated someone.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time, you know, and you are hardly the first person I’ve had this conversation with. I’ve done it myself. Throw yourself into battle and forget the rest. When you’re fighting, you don’t have to dwell on it. All your concentration is occupied. But we can’t keep that up forever, or we’d be no different from the Black Century.” Cas’ voice is almost fond, their look almost wistful. And Gucci understands, painfully: she was not mistaken in her first impression. They are being sincere. And so she knows what cas is about to say before cas says it.

“Understand that I am not trying to undermine your authority when I have to ask this of you.” They quit their pacing, stare her down with clear eyes. “Saint Dawn, promise me this is not a suicide mission.”

“It’s not.” She answers too quickly, nails curled and digging into her own palm. Of course it’s not. How can they think that? “Really, Cas’alear, I’m _fine._ We are at war and we must all contend with loss. And she was—”

Then cas’ posture finally breaks, the hint of what she feels mirrored in their voice. The rage of not knowing, not understanding what happened here. Or not wanting to. “Why will no one here say her name? Kesh will strike her from the annals of their history, must we do the same?”

“Clementine Kesh was an enemy of nearly everyone here.” And what a relief it is, to say her name, even like this. Instead of dancing around her invisible presence on this ship, as if they could look back and pretend that Fort Icebreaker was taken by Millennium Break itself. A weight falls from her, suddenly, and Gucci finds herself leaning back in her seat, her face tilted not towards Cas’alear but up to the ceiling. “I’m surprised to hear you speak in her defense.”

“I might not be here, if not for Clementine Kesh.” Cas says, irritably, and folds back into their chair. “I knew she made plenty of enemies—her own fault, I do understand—but I did not realize the extent of the damage. I was under the impression you two had been friends.”

Friends. Gucci nearly laughs. They were plenty of things—rivals, comrades, an investment that didn’t pay off. Not friends. Clementine Kesh was no one’s friend.

It’s too much to explain. “We were. And this is not a credit to me.”

Cas frowns, deep, distorting the scales around their eyes. “It should be otherwise.”

 _That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?_ She thinks, bitterly. See, this is why she hasn’t been talking about it. _A lot of things should be otherwise._ But it would be unkind, and so she says nothing, just drains her glass and then closes her eyes against the headache she can already feel coming on. They’re just trying to help.

When cas speaks again, their military bearing has returned, their tone clipped and plain. “We first met over the ruins of Past. I found her to be naïve, and spoiled, and vicious. As she was.” Cas’ hand rests on the map, tracing over Obelle. “But there was something so honest about her ambition. She didn’t even pretend at hiding it behind altruism or national pride. She wore it on her sleeve. So I knew I could trust her.”

Gucci follows the path of their hand in stunned, reverent silence. She has never heard anyone talk about Clementine this way before. Even her own Sovereign, even their late and patient miracle-worker only praised her future utility. Her far-off potential. How she could become something better. And she had fallen, over the course of the past year, into the same trap.

“If you ever need to speak of her, I will gladly listen.” Cas’alear finishes, and pour two more glasses of brandy.

They glitter there, warm and amber. Gucci Garantine is not ready, then, but in the days to come she will take cas up on their offer. She will not tell the whole truth, but they will talk with warmth in their voices, and she will feel the wound in her chest that she has tried not to notice, feel it slowly stitching itself up.

The thing that wakes her is entirely an accident.

They do, in the end, let her pilot a mech. Clementine is no better than she once was, but the machine she’s strapped into is a glorified piece of construction equipment, mostly automated. Even one-handed she couldn’t possibly steer it wrong. Her use is mainly for her human eye, to select what pieces of scrap metal can be carried back from the battlefield. Boring, meaningless work, but she likes being in a mech again as much as she likes anything.

The cockpit gives her a good vantage. The seat forces her back straight. It is also, blessedly, nothing like the Panther.

Carrion Collections has profited from revolutionary activities across the moon, and today is no different. Skirmishes have dotted the low slate for the past week, Millennium Break pitted against Orion’s finest military and mercenaries. The mercenaries, with a few choice words from the company of the Spade, had turned quickly. Clementine doesn’t follow politics these days, but even as weak as it is her strategist’s eye can see how it will go. The Principality will call it dishonor and miscalculation. Her new companions call it a bloodbath.

Once the field is clear, they, the vultures, swoop in. It’s abominably dull: pick up anything not completely riddled with hole, carry it neatly and carefully. She doesn’t have to think much to do this. Compared to the Panther, this machine is a toy for children. So Clementine is only half looking at the only half a mech that she’s supposed to be peeling armor off.

Instead, it’s the smoke in the air that draws her eye mere moments before the violence erupts again. Then there’s the metal screech and scrape of violence, sirens blaring, nearer than it should be. A few loyal Orion soldiers unwilling to give up. She can’t find it in her anymore to feel much about the Principality taking yet another loss. If her throne is burnt to nothing, they might as well throw the rest of it on the pyre.

But she looks up when, with a sound like a chandelier shattering, the Transgress Oblige takes the field.

For a moment, Clementine thinks she’s dreaming. The Oblige has featured often in her nightmares since the first time she saw it, since the first time it nearly killed her. Since she first saw what she looked like reflected in its light. It towers now, as it does in her mind, a beacon, a presence that cannot be ignored. Spears held aloft, wings splayed.

Times have changed. Today the Transgress Oblige is announcing itself not as a terrorist nor even a freedom fighter but a hero, pure and simple. She knows who is in the pilot’s seat. Something snaps in her.

Clementine moves without thinking, slams her mech into a gear it was never meant to achieve. Nothing in her vision but that towering figure of crystal. The metal screams in protest and it drowns out everything else, the sound of voices over the radio never reaching her ears.

It’s like she’s being driven, like something else is inside and piloting her. Someone else steering her. Propelled by the rising heat of the first thing she can remember wanting that was wholly her own and not her mother’s idea:

_I will beat Gucci Garantine._

She doesn’t know what she plans to do, really, whether this is a bid for rescue or violence or something else entirely. Her body is howling in pain. Pushed too hard too fast and splitting at the seams, but even more than that, she is screaming to be seen. _I am here!_ wants to tear itself out from her throat which never quite healed right. _I am here, look at me!_

When the Oblige opens up, she almost welcomes it.

Clementine knows the trick is coming, of course, and doesn’t bother trying to shield herself. The Transgress Oblige unfurls itself like a flower, the light fragmenting off it, and she only looks closer. Trying to catch a glimpse of the person at the heart of it, even though she knows what will happen, knows that she will see only what she’s seen in its mirrors many times before: the millions of faces of the Principality, seeing her. Judging her. Finding her wanting.

As it turns out, she’s wrong again. Instead, she sees nothing. Nothing in that glass but the light. Not even her own face.

But it doesn’t work. She isn’t stunned by the revelation, isn’t slowed for a moment. She’s not a part of the Principality anymore. Of course. Why would a dead person show up in a mirror? It’s so galling and obvious that she can only laugh.

She’s laughing still when her body gives out and she drops, again, underwater.

When Clementine wakes up, there’s a moment where she thinks she’s traveled back in time. Sure enough, she’s in the infirmary again, aching and dizzy. Midnite Matinee is at her bedside, tapping an impatient foot. Maybe the last few months have been a fever dream.

“Welcome back to the world of the living. Again.” So it was real, she realizes with a strange, distant sort of thrill. Gucci was real. She really was there. “Care to explain what the fuck you were thinking?”

Clementine gives her best, most gracious smile, the one usually reserved for her mother’s guests. “Yes, well. I was told there might be permanent neurological damage. On account of the drowning. So I’m sure I wasn’t thinking at all.”

The irritated twitch of an ear. Her politeness and good humor is wasted on this lot. “Oh, this is great. It makes jokes now.”

Her lip curls. Has she really been letting people talk to her this way? Clementine does her best to sit straight, to push herself up with one arm. “I need to get out of this bed.” Stupid to think that time would stand still for her. That the world would stop just because she’s not in it. Arrogant again.

( _Progression_ , they would have said, _means that time marches on. It stops for no empire._ )

“Mm. About that.” Midnite slings an arm around her shoulders and pulls her up like she’s a particularly stubborn bit of cargo. “Might be time for you to go treat that brain damage of yours someplace where it won’t cost me a mech.”

Clementine takes her exile more gracefully this time, even as she’s unsteady on her feet. They aren’t unkind about it. They leave her near enough to Marengo, at least, that she’s unlikely to starve to death in the hills. And then she is unceremoniously alone once again.

In space controlled by Millennium Break, even someone without citizenship could be permitted into the cramped end of a train. It’s almost better this way. No one will ask questions. Again she realizes, with equal parts reassurance and revulsion, that she no longer even looks like Clementine Kesh. Close enough to be a good impersonator, maybe, in those little comedies that would’ve made the military clap and laugh politely.

She wants to go home so badly. But there is no throne in Cruciat. There is no way back in time or into space.

It’s funny. She’s not even from Partizan, has only been here the better part of…fuck, it must be nearly two years now. Sent here to do this thing she has failed so utterly at.

But she had seen pictures of the throne room in the Winter Palace long before she ever set foot on this stupid moon. The Princept’s second home, one of the great jewels of Stel Kesh. As a child she had counted: fourth, fifth, sixth in line and decided that her compass would point there. To that room with its stars and its dark chair that she knew the feeling of only for a moment.

And so her compass spins, uselessly, in place. Shivering on the train platform, Clementine holds still and closes her eyes. Tries to picture the future she once saw so clearly.

It’s no use. The details fade away into darkness or seem to tear and burn in her mind. The only thing that remains clear is the feeling of Gucci Garantine’s presence at her back. A sliver of black wood. A familiar hand tracing along it, both warm and pragmatic in her consideration. Saying, measured, “This meant something to someone, once.”


	3. perspective

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> forgive me if this is overwrought. i am trying to exorcise this horrible little woman from my heart. i miss her every day.
> 
> warnings:  
> depiction of harm to animals (in the context of hunting,) robots, and humans  
> discussion of grief
> 
> [soundtrack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsuOQLy_wzY)

Winter comes down harshest on Kesh’s holdings on Partizan, bitter cold and brutal. Those in Cruciat are more mild, though subject to the damp weather coming off the bay. But out in the Verglaz Taiga, the places left unblessed by God’s new growth, there is no avoiding it.

It is a beautiful winter day, and Clementine Kesh is hunting birds. The air is cold enough to snap, but the sky is clear, sun reflecting off the snow bright enough to blind the unsuspecting.

She’s no good at this, not really, but she does know how to fire a gun.

It helps that the sudden emergence of the jungle just north of here has made the animals complacent, well fed on new abundance. The grouses take no notice of her crouched still in a snowdrift, wrapped in her white coat.

(It’s not as if she could go to Cruciat, but she doesn’t know, exactly, what brought her here. The cold, mostly, she missed the cold. And while the new jungle was almost certainly full of the Principality’s best-connected and brightest, out here only the people who could not afford to leave remained. Safer this way. Stupid, though, to go somewhere familiar. The last time she was in the Verglaz, she had visited House Chasmata’s estate. The meetings had come with lavish feasts and expensive tea, and after they had gone hunting. Only for sport, of course. With only the newest machines to assist them.)

Her prosthetic can’t handle much. It’s ornamental more than anything, empty armor plates locking together. A cheap knockoff of a classic Kesh style, purchased with her final paycheck. But appearances are everything, Clementine, she’s always been told so. And it serves well enough as a firing brace, balancing her other arm where she kneels in the snow.

Steady. She ignores the sun in her eyes. She’s killed _people_ before—keep it together, Clementine. You could be so much better than this.

 _Progression_ , she mouths silently. It has become a nervous habit.

She fires three times.

The place Clementine has made her temporary home is not beyond the reach of the Principality, nowhere is. Technically, she should be paying some Kesh noble whose land she’s living on. But there are so many people who have simply packed their things and left for better fortunes. So many conscripts that do not come back. And she knows better than most how little attention the Kesh nobles are paying to the census of their holdings, especially right now. So she figures she has a few months at best in the small wooden hut, smaller even than her quarters on Icebreaker had been.

It's enough to live, but she’s no good at it. No good at shooting, or finding food, or keeping the dirt and snow out, or getting firewood into even pieces to feed the stove that she sleeps by, huddled in her clothes. The only concession she’s made is a small chess set, the same cheap plastic that any child in the Principality who wasn’t a noble heir could have. It sits in the center of her little table, and every time she walks by she makes a move against herself. On the nights she can’t sleep, which is most nights, she sits up and puzzles at it, playing circuitous games that never end. Passing secret messages to herself alone.

Clementine moves it aside to focus on her catch. One little bird with an unpleasant hole shot through its wing. For some reason she can’t look at it.

She braces it with her metal hand and pulls with the other, fingers twisted in the feathers. The kind that would be used for pillows back in the winter palace. She’s no good at this. She will be picking them out of her teeth later.

The hard part. She draws her knife and tries to focus without focusing. _Progression._ She’s killed people before. This shouldn’t be so hard. The knife goes in. _Progression._ She should have a stronger stomach. _Progression._ She wants to live and so she has to eat. She wants to live. She wants to live so badly that she’s out here shivering and hungry and miserable instead of luxuriously, effortlessly dead.

For all the effort, it turns out poorly. Feeding herself is another thing she is learning she is no good at. It never seemed so complicated when the palace cooks did it.

In the few hours of true night, Clementine plays chess by an unpleasantly fluorescent light. Back and forth against herself. It’s hard to say she’s gotten better. The game going nowhere, moving in a circle and stagnating.

And yet there is something tempting about this endless circling. Survival is not easy, but it’s less crushing than making plans that will fail. And she is…not guilty, of course not guilty, but chastened. Feeling like a child again: her mother was often less disappointed in her actions than in her untidiness at them, the fact that she got caught. Maybe Gur Sevraq was right, and exile is the best she can hope for. Maybe the best thing she could do is to let herself fade from history.

 _You can better than that_ , she thinks to herself in a weak facsimile of Gucci’s voice. _Play like there’s real competition. Play like you have something to win._

It’s not much, but it straightens her back a little. The first time she ever played, it was with a simpering tutor. The second time, though, had been with Gucci, who had been patient but refused to go easy on her, beat her again and again until they both got bored of it and started making up their own rules.

The third time Clementine played chess was years later. She tries not to think of it.

It’s the same dream most nights.

Gucci Garantine walks the darkened halls of the Winter Palace. Past a window overlooking the gardens, past a familiar bedroom door. After so many visits for parties and budget meetings, she knows where she’s going without having to see. Familiar enough under daylight, but in these dreams the corridors stretch forever, twisting back on each other until she knows they can only be leading in one direction.

She sees, as she walks, the familiar evidence of a grand tantrum: the fine china smashed, the antique furniture turned over. The portraits that lined these halls were beautiful, once. Now all their faces have been scratched out. All ruined but the sphinx of Kesh itself, reclining in a long tapestry. It smiles at her as she passes and unfurls itself, shoulders rolling, wings stretching as it pads away from its place on the wall.

It takes up a place beside her, saying nothing, matching her stride and walking with a grace that seems impossible for its size. It is of a height with her, but so long. Its feline body is lined with lean muscle, its claws like blades. Its wingspan is great enough to brush both sides of the hallway. The symbols of the five Stels were chosen as monsters for a reason.

And it is painfully familiar in its human aspect. The teeth are new, the sharpness, the utter confidence. But it’s the face she looks for in every broadcast, on every scouting mission. Hoping, despite herself: What if, somehow?

The Clementine her mind conjures up is not the person she was in her final days. It’s Clem in a rare moment out of her mother’s shadow, a summer years ago when she had rowed and rowed hard and flushed for once with well-deserved pride. Enjoying the taste of confidence and success even if a little too much.

 _I should have said something then_ , Gucci thinks sometimes. _Or any time before it was too late. I should have pushed harder. I should have spoken more openly. Should have given up on our game and just told her, plainly…_

It’s no use and she knows it. Clementine made her choice. Made many choices.

It was only ever one person’s fault.

The throne room is just how she remembers it. The inlaid stars glitter up from the floor, down from the ceiling, so encompassing it’s as if she’s actually walking among them, across space itself. At the end of the hall, the throne has its own sort of gravity, pulling them to approach. In person, it had seemed stunningly small, holding only an echo of its power as a symbol, the meaning made and given. Here, it looms.

The sphinx climbs into the throne like she truly does belong there, drapes her limbs over it, wings folded in to fit. Gucci does not kneel in supplication but waits, as if to say: go on, then.

“What does it mean,” Clementine Kesh purrs, throwing her own riddle back at her, “The Rapid Evening?”

The evening has come and gone. Not like the one their forebears brought down millennia ago, but regardless, the Rapid Evening is no more. Clementine’s continued existence had barely been holding the idea together in the first place. Now even that string is cut.

She’ll never know what it meant. “It’s dawn now, Clem.”

“Of course. And are they looking to the Horizon?” There’s nothing coy in her tone. Clementine has never been shy about looking down on others. “Do you like that? Is that what you wanted?”

“Don’t be jealous.” Gucci snaps back before she can think better of it. In her waking hours she might hold the bitterness at bay. Here, she allows herself every emotional indulgence. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“Don’t lie to me. It doesn’t suit you.” The vision mocks, her face twisted into Clementine’s familiar scowl, teeth bared. “Is this what you wanted, then? You can’t have it. It’s mine.”

She bristles with the fury that had possessed her once, wings of the sphinx flaring out to make her look bigger. Her claws scrape a threat into the wood of the throne.

Gucci only steps closer, angry and sad and undaunted. Clem’s posturing had never worked on her. They knew each other too well.

“I don’t want the throne.” She says, and though she means to shout it as a reprimand it comes out nearly pleading. The weight of what she’s been carrying works its way up through her throat. “I don’t even want power, not the way I might’ve once. I miss you. But I don’t want you back. I want to ruin the world that made you. So that there will be no more noble scions. No one who grows up thinking it is their right to step on others. No more girls kicked aside by their mothers. I want to create a world in which Clementine Kesh could never exist.”

The real Clementine Kesh would never have even been able to process such a confession. That some should be born to rule others was as much as fact in her mind as the air she breathed. She died because she couldn’t let go of it.

But this one considers her, feline and watchful. “So even you think less than nothing of me.” The sphinx rolls over as if she were no more than a cat, rendered tame. She bares her neck. Pale skin and white fur. “Go on, then. Forget me.”

Of course that’s what she would hear. This is how it would have gone, if it had happened. They would have fought terribly. Gucci would have refused to indulge her petulance, which would have only made her the more petulant. “I told you I miss you.” She admits again, feels her voice tremble just slightly in a way it hasn’t since she was young, before she was so perfectly trained for speaking. “It’s so…dull without you. You’re the one I was meant to fight.”

Gucci feels it then, like she always does in this dream. The weight of the sword at her side. She loved these kinds of stories as a child, the romantic, monster-killing ones, had insisted for many months on carrying a toy replica around. House Brightline had always been heroes, always noble warriors, defending the meek of the Principality against tyrants or stranger, more horrible foes. At least, that’s the story they told her as a child.

She knows better, now, knows it’s more complicated. And prefers to fight with a spear. The sword, when she draws it, is so achingly heavy. But she still loves those tales.

The sphinx, she learned in her schooling, represents all the good of Kesh. A guardian of wisdom, protecting it from those lesser beings who were not ready to receive it. In every icon, every statues and painting, she is beautiful. Noble of bearing. Not like Columnar’s chimera, who struggles to fit its different pieces together. She is seamless, impossible and beautiful.

Gucci takes another step closer. The poison of Stel Kesh is in her too. That is the thing that tells her this is the story assigned to her. She will always have to watch herself, to ensure her draw to heroism does not become something worse. She must not live within the bounds of their stories.

The sword rings horribly when she drops it, scratching the beautiful inlaid floor. Gently, she takes Clementine’s face in her hands. She can’t remember the feeling anymore.

If it was a story, really, she would kiss her now and transform her back into the girl she knew years ago. Instead her claws only get sharper. They rake down Gucci’s back in an embrace, biting deep. Yes, the Stels are represented by monsters for a reason.

“Forget me.” Clementine repeats, a whisper low in her ear. “But keep our rivalry close.”

And she wakes up, alone again, sore and sweating through the sheets of her bed on Icebreaker Prime.

It’s still early, before what is officially considered her first shift. She might sleep a little more. Gucci closes her eyes. It’s no use. Her face is there.

Yawning, she rises, her joints complaining. Sorts through her wardrobe for a few moments, looking for something that says both _comfort_ and _armor_. Ignores the soft white sweater out of place, meant to be returned at a later time that never came. Chooses, instead, an old favorite; a black jumpsuit slashed through with red.

Thus protected, she heads for her command deck, that she might at least be useful. It’s better, she finds, when she can work, when she can feel in control. And every effort counts. Millennium Break cannot afford to rest.

It may be for different reasons, but she can feel the shared sentiment flowing among the people: we will not lose another. Even the gentlest among them have changed these past few months. Even idealistic Valence carries a gun, now. In comparison, she has not lost so much. Everyone loses their childhood eventually, she knows, and it’s a mark of her privilege that it took until now.

Still, like everyone else, she lets it fuel her. Gucci intends to make good on her promise. To keep their rivalry alive. When she lacked in motivation, before, she would always turn to Clementine. Now she will never lack for motivation again, nor the will to see it through. For all the daughters who might grow up different.

She settles in for the next few hours of reviewing all their surveillance footage one more time. Just in case.

In the end, history finds her again whether she wants it or not.

Clementine loses track of the days now, mostly, but the markets happen regularly enough for her to catch them. It’s the sort of thing Kesh nobles loved, taking a sled out and playing tourist with the people who foraged and farmed their land. She had been invited on such a trip during her first months on the moon, but had claimed to be ill in order to avoid being stuck talking to Lucia Whitestar all day.

Now, she mostly goes in hope of food that isn’t meat. There’s trinkets, true, and old tech, but she avoids anything that could give her away. And there’s a large part of her that couldn’t bear the information from the Palace right now, doesn’t even want to know what’s going on. It might be the month of the Sphinx now, her birthday come and gone, and she would have no idea. Crysanth had insisted on her being born then, of course.

She gets a little news from gossip, here and there, but she’s not the only person living out here whose wounds mark her as a soldier. People know enough to be tactful. To not assume what side someone was fighting for. She secures her safety by not standing out.

The newcomer today, though, has not learned that lesson.

They’re Columnar, lanky and mechanical but thankfully human-like. Only two arms. Wearing a blue hunter’s coat that’s kept poorly, ripped and stained in several places. Their face is ornamented by what looks like porcelain—but, being likely the only person here who’s seen real porcelain, Clementine can tell it’s an imitation.

Strange. She would have turned her nose up at that, before, but now it’s a relief. The less money they have, the less chance they might know her if they glimpse her.

They’re causing some kind of scene in front of an old woman who looks awkwardly away. Asking for…food, or directions, maybe, she can’t quite catch it. The sort of pathetic business she intends to stay out of, only. Only she catches the word _Cruciat_ and _ran away_ and she can’t, she just can’t help herself.

“If there were a deserter here, giving them shelter would be considered a crime against the Principality.” She sidles up to them, her footsteps dampened by the snow and fallen leaves. They wheel around, startled, snapping to a soldier’s alertness. Their face is human, more human than she expected, only cast in metal.

For a second there’s—something familiar there, a focused and unashamed interest that Clementine hasn’t felt from anyone in a long time. And even at the time she had second-guessed it until that, too, had slipped out of her hands.

Then they tilt their head, making a soft metallic noise. “Sorry. I just—” Their voice is coming from a speaker somewhere in their throat. It sounds a little damaged. “I’ve been out here for ages without seeing anyone. I’m not built for this kind of cold.”

 _Then why deploy you in Kesh territory at all?_ She thinks for a moment, but bites her tongue. She knows plenty well how little logic there is to their armies, especially now. And Cruciat would have been milder, especially earlier this year. One thought and she can imagine it. They would have had plenty of supplies to keep warm—or the appearance of them at least. It had to seem like a proper fight. Before it became clear that Crysanth had practically given the city away.

This person is just another piece of that play, another thing given away. Not as important as a throne, surely, but still.

“Aiding a deserter would be a crime. But inviting a new neighbor for tea, one whose circumstances I know nothing of…” She does not smile as she trails off, isn’t entirely sure she knows how to anymore. Perhaps that’s why it takes a moment for them to grasp what she’s offering.

“Oh.” They tilt their head again. “Oh!” And then they’re following eagerly as she turns and begins to retrace her steps through the snow.

It’s a long walk home, and Clementine regrets it almost immediately. It was stupid of her, breaking the only rule of her exile: do not draw attention to yourself. It had just seemed…in the moment she had wanted…proof that the rest of the moon has continued to exist, has not all turned to snow.

It occurs to her, then. Is she lonely? Impossible.

But she has, for a very long time, been used to being around people. People who…mostly hated her guts, sure, but paid her a great deal of attention.

“So,” she tries, though it’s a little soon to show what she wants so badly. She just needs to get out of her own head. “Were you really in Cruciat? When they…”

They look up, almost startled. They’ve been diligent in stepping carefully in her footprints, so as to avoid where the snow is deep. “It was horrible. Fires everywhere…you should have seen the mess they made of museum row.” A meek, staticky laugh comes through their speakers. “Sorry, are you from there?”

“Born and raised.” Clementine lies. It might as well be true. She’d certainly behaved as if it was. Even those first few months on the moon, before the Rapid Evening. She’d hated Partizan, but loved Cruciat. The whole city was like a palace itself, every building ornamented. She’d never been one for museums, but she’d loved the gardens, the canals. The cold air in the morning. The fog that rolled off the bay. The smell of woodsmoke at night. With Kesh itself and the People’s Throne off limits, Cruciat was the closest one could get to true power. You could feel it running through the streets.

“Well, you’d never recognize it now. You can’t tell where the ash ends and the snow begins.”

Clementine says nothing, curls her fingers in the pockets of her coat, feeling the angry weight of her gun. She can imagine it. She can imagine them marching in. Her real question, of what happened to the palace and the throne within, should probably wait until she’s inside and sitting down.

By the time they arrive, it’s starting to get dark. Her little cabin—if it can even be called that—is unassuming, blending in with the spruces and pines surrounding it. She fiddles with the lock for a moment, and gestures for her companion to follow her inside.

It happens fast.

One of their limbs snaps around like a garroting wire, intended to wrap her in a chokehold. It’s only the fact that she was waiting for this that saves her. She catches it against the unfeeling weight of her metal arm. Clementine hates, hates that she expected this. But if she hadn’t, she’d probably be dead a second time over.

It’s not at all the same, but she can’t help but feel like it is. All thoughts of planning leave her in favor of desperate violence. They slam together in a tangle of limbs, metal and flesh biting together. Too familiar. There’s no room to draw her gun. Her raw fury will have to do.

They’re strong. They’re built for fighting in a way that she has never been. But she keeps busy with her body, and the longer it goes on the more she starts to see that her would-be killer came prepared for a spoiled princess, not a wild animal. And so they are wholly unprepared for her to scream and to charge them like a bull, head and shoulder low to slam the both of them into the wall.

They kick out with a spindly leg, frantic, to knock the small table over between them to get some space. It’s no use. Clementine ignores the sharp pain of it hitting her leg, ignores the chess board landing at her feet. Ignores the pieces probably chipping as they scatter across the floor.

She shoves them up hard, feeling the hard press of metal scrape against her and ignores that too. She’s become very good at that part. They writhe in her grip, one arm twisted unnaturally and trapped behind their back. Clementine does not let up. Luck and the advantage of surprise have given her a good angle, but it won’t help her twice.

Their other arm moves, ever so subtly, towards the gun tucked in her coat. Good. If they think they might win, then they’ll talk to buy time. It’s exactly what she would have done.

Clementine pushes her weight up through her shoulder, pinning them with her metal arm. “Why are you here?” she snaps. Tries to recollect the tone of a Kesh interrogator, perfectly cold and cruel. “Who sent you after me?”

It comes out a poor, wavering imitation, and they laugh. “The Curtain does not tolerate loose threads.” The satisfaction in their voice is clear even through the tinny speakers that broadcast it: so assured of their victory that giving up information doesn’t matter.

They shift, bring their free hand a little closer to her gun. Without much time, she tries to think, what would her many advisors have her ask? What is the most strategic move? But the voices ripple and overlap in her head, and she was never very good at chess anyway.

“Is there still a throne in Cruciat?” Clementine asks instead.

They look at her for a second, just look at her like they don’t understand what she’s asking. Like the question doesn’t make any sense. Like they can’t see why it would make any difference. And then she can feel them reach further and so she pulls her little knife from her boot where it has remained all this time and jabs it up through wires and metal plates again, and again until they stop moving. Even after they stop moving. _Progression._ Until her arm shakes with the effort. _Progression._ She wants to live.

Clementine lets the weight of their body pull her down with it, folds down onto her knees. She’s still holding her knife. She can’t let go of it. The head of a rook is digging into her knee.

Stupid of her, to think she could avoid it forever. To think she would be permitted to live, and hide away here and play house. Escape was a luxury too, another one that has been taken from her. Exile had seemed like the most horrible option, once, but it had always at least been an option.

 _I get it_ , she wishes she could snap at Gur Sevraq now. _I get your stupid lesson. Yes, I understand, I’ve done such horrible things, I fucking get it._

She curls in on herself, head between her knees, trying not to cry or throw up. Only for a moment. She doesn’t have time for this.

Feeling, still, like a trapped animal, Clementine tries to swallow her rising panic. What now? What should she do? This was a poor attempt, an underestimation so very typical of her mother. But she won’t make the same mistake twice. Nor will she suffer such a humiliation without repaying it. Should she even try to hide the body? She can’t stay, obviously. But where to go? Cruciat would be painting a target on her back, still. There’s nowhere on this moon or any other where the resources of a spymaster couldn’t find her.

She could ask for help and shelter. Crawl back on her knees and play penitent. Millennium Break as an organization would never take her in, but someone might take pity on her. Someone might.

No. She still has her pride. When she sees Gucci Garantine again it will be on her own terms.

She thinks about what Sovereign Immunity had said, months ago. Maybe there are still things she could leverage, even now. Something that could make them--not take her back, no, she won’t be a prisoner again. But something that could make her valuable alive.

It is an unbelievable stupid idea. Just slightly less impossible than claiming a throne which no longer exists. Instead of waiting around for her mother to kill her, she could…she could…

She knows her mother better than anyone else on the outside. If she were Crysanth…she would no longer be in Cruciat, certainly. Would have welcomed the rebels in, to turn themselves into a sitting target. But neither can she do her work fully invisible, so she won’t have disappeared entirely, will still be in some place well connected enough for her purposes. Some Kesh estate, maybe? Maybe closer than she’d even thought. There must be a trail of some kind.

Clementine looks at the board overturned again. But whatever pattern of geometry leads to victory, she’s still unable to see it.

( _Forget the end of the game,_ they had told her over yet another round. She had lost, badly. _Do not think of your moves as distinct from each other. Let them be a progression. You think only of whether the next move will bring you victory. This is why you will never win._ )

She has remained a poor student.

Clementine rises, unsteady, to her feet. Fuck it. Fuck Gur Sevraq, fuck all of them. All of her greatest victories have been unplanned, anyway. It was impulse that made her raise her gun in the sand, instinct that fueled her decision to take Icebreaker Prime.

It’s something just as raw that pilots her body now, as she gathers what she can. Firewood, cheap cooking oil. _Progression_ lingers on her tongue as she hauls it out, ignoring her body’s aching protests now that the fight has left her. _Progression_ as she takes her knife out again and sets to work dismantling whatever fuel sources she can pry out of the body on the floor. She drags the whole mess outside, relieved, for a moment, by the winter air hitting her face. It feels like proof she’s still alive.

Her supplies aren’t much, but it’s enough for her to trace the shape she wants. Writ large in the dead leaves: a shaky M, an unsteady spear.

It lights beautifully.

It doesn’t take long for the dry wood of her recent home to burn. Clementine warms herself with it one last time. _Progression_ , she murmurs, rubbing her hands together to shake the numbness. She doesn’t know where she will go next. She just knows that she has to go, and to keep moving.

Anyone flying over will see the blazing sign. The Palace will pick it up, add it to the list of many such rebellious acts. Whoever of the Curtain might want to check their progress will certainly see it, will know what she’s done and see the implication of who may have helped her. Millennium Break may not see it, may not know they have been implicated, but this does not bother her much. It’s a play to put her on the board, not for anyone else’s benefit.

The fire crackles, distorting the freezing air. For a moment she imagines it visible from space, imagines that even the stolen homeworld of Kesh could see it. Clementine tilts her head up to the clear sky. The constellation of the spear stretches on forever, up and over the horizon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and that is where i'm leaving it. i have my idea of what happens next, but i'd rather leave it up to imagination. and i wouldn't feel right about writing a happy ending for clem in particular.


End file.
